The NDP Premier of BC is off to China. Glen Clark begins a week long "trade mission" to meet with the dictatorship and make deals. This is not the first time that the Premier has spat in the face of human rights at home and abroad. On the day worldwide protests were called against the massacre of Indigenous people at Acteal, Premier Clark was making deals with the Zedillo regime as part of the "Team Canada" trade mission led by Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
As BC's Clark does business with dictators abroad, so too does he practice anti-human rights practices here at home. Clark's extinguishment and termination agenda to destroy the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Indigenous peoples is in high gear with a "BC Treaty Process" which the Union of BC Indian Chiefs has called "ethnic cleansing". "Legitimizing the theft of our land" was how Haida elder Lavina White describes the usurpation-as-genocide activities of BC's NDP government.
In 1995, the BC NDP government orchestrated the largest paramilitary operation in Canadian history against a small group of Shuswap traditionalists resisting eviction from the Ts'peten Sundance grounds near Gustafsen Lake. In the course of the month long armed siege, armoured personnel carriers, land-mines, tens of thousands of rounds of hollow-tipped ammunition, and an FBI "psy-ops" consultant were brought against the occupants of the Sundance camp. Further revelations emerged later during the trial of a systmatic "smear and disinformation" campaign conducted by the authorities with the apparent collaboration of the domestic media.
Despite widespread international support for a public inquiry call, the BC NDP government has refused it. Premier Clark stated that he supports the actions taken by his predecessor, Mike Harcourt. The Premier's Attorney General, Ujjal Dosanjh, who orchestrated the assault, is also the Minister of Human Rights and has effectively muzzled any serious protests from a compliant Human Rights/Civil Liberties establishment which he funds and controls. Opposition parties have also remained virtually silent on the matter. Recently NDP federal MP Svend Robinson, campaigning against state abuses which occurred against protesters during the Apec conference, publically refused to support an inquiry into the Gustafsen matter.
Please condemn the NDP Premier for his apparent eagerness to do business with dictators and for his suppression of Indigenous rights in BC. We must demand that the coverup of state crimes at Gustafsen Lake cease, an inquiry be convened immediately, and the injust imprisonment of the 67 year old Shuswap elder Wolverine, cease at once.